Brizzly: A Twitter Reader From The People Who Brought You Google Reader
Brizzly is the second project under Thing Labs, a development house started by former Googler Jason Shellen. Their first project was Plinky, a more proactive take on blogging. But Shellen decided the time was right to launch something that tackled the whole Twitter craze, and improved upon the experience of it. So he brought one of the creators of Google Reader, Chris Wetherell, on board along with a few others from that team and they built Brizzly.
Some of the more robust Twitter apps have variations on some of these features, but Brizzly is doing this while being entirely web-based. And it’s really the UI that will make or break something like this, and Brizzly looks like it has a nice one (see screenshot).
Plus they have a killer logo of what looks to be a bear wearing a dead Twitter bird’s skin.
And this is just the first step for Brizzly. They are considering future support for Facebook and some of the other social services, Shellen says. And they plan to do some mobile-specific interfaces, maybe even an iPhone app.
Following today’s preview, Brizzly will enter closed beta testing next week. You can sign up to receive an invite when they’re ready, here.
Note: The UI and design of Brizzly hasn’t been finalize yet, the image below is what the working model looks like.
Here’s the video demo of Brizzly from the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp: